Cornflower Books

Looking forward to ... Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life

   

 

    I'm not wishing away the summer, but looking ahead to the autumn, there's a literary biography due out in November which I'm sure a lot of us will want to read. The publisher's catalogue describes Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life thus:

    "Intimate, perceptive, critically acute, funny and moving, this is the first full biography of one of the finest English novelists of the last century.

    Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. The first group of these drew on her own experiences – a boat on the Thames in the 1960s; the BBC in war time; a failing bookshop in a Suffolk; an eccentric stage-school. The later ones opened out to encompass historical worlds which, magically, she seemed to possess entirely: Russia before the Revolution; post-war Italy; Germany in the time of the Romantic writer Novalis.

    Fitzgerald’s life is as various, as cryptic and as intriguing as her fiction. It spans most of the twentieth century, and moves from a Bishop’s Palace to a sinking barge, from a demanding intellectual family to hardship and poverty, from a life of teaching and obscurity to a blaze of renown. She started publishing at sixty and became famous at eighty. This is a story of lateness, patience and persistence: a private form of heroism.

    Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. She liked to mislead people with a good imitation of an absent-minded old lady; but under that scatty front were a steel-sharp brain and an imagination of wonderful reach. This brilliant biography – by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired – pursues her life, her writing, and her secret self, with fascinated interest."

    Definitely one to look forward to.

    If you're not already acquainted with Penelope Fitzgerald's novels there is a post on The Bookshop, which was a group read, here; one on The Blue Flower here; click here for The Gate of Angels, and for Human Voices look here. Going off at a slight tangent, here is a post on House-Bound by Winifred Peck, the Afterword for which was written by Penelope Fitzgerald, Winifred Peck's niece.

Catching up - this week's posts

 

 

    I've been very behind with replying to comments this week, and I've had no email for most of today so there'll be a lot of catching up required when I manage to reconnect, but for now, a pause for breath and a look back to the last few posts.

    I'm glad the Maugham went down so well, and for anyone wondering what our next CBG book will be, I thought a break was in order. We've done 60 books, which is very good going, and so it might be an idea to take a breather and resume in September - I'll post the book for that month as soon as I've picked one.

    Second cause for gladness: the shelves are still up! Mr. C., not the handiest man I know, has done a good job, so as long as I don't overload them as I did once before, all should be well.

    Very many thanks for your answers to my 'bespoke books' question - they make such interesting reading, and please do add more if you're so minded.

    Next, strong opinions on Eat, Pray Love! For what it's worth, I heard the book's editor say recently that the film (and I paraphrase) 'leaves something to be desired'.

    Lastly, take a look at the cover of Indiscretion by Charles Dubow over there in the right hand sidebar. What do you see? The book itself has been sitting on my desk all day, but it has taken me a while to realise that it isn't actually a picture of a snowman against a dark sky! Time to rest the eyes and the brain...

Books of the day

   

    I must be the only person in the world who hasn't read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything (or seen the film), but I have watched Elizabeth in action as a speaker - most notably in her famous TED talk, to which I've linked before - and I find her very engaging, and having heard tantalising snippets about her forthcoming novel I am very keen to read it. It won't be out until October, but The Signature of All Things looks set to be one of the 'big' books of the autumn, and I'm delighted to have an early proof and to be able to get to it soon I hope. It is a historical novel about a female botanist (click here for more on that) and incorporates - see this short video - "wonder, marvel, travel, curiosity, spirituality ..." themes close to Elizabeth's heart.

    Mr Darwin's Gardener by Kristina Carlson (translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah) will be out on the 1st. of June, and is the latest book from Peirene Press whose short, European fiction is quality stuff, as you'll see from this post and this one. The new book is "a postmodern Victorian novel about faith, knowledge and our inner needs," and is set in the late 1870s in the Kentish village of Downe. "The villagers gather in church one rainy Sunday. Only Thomas Davies stays away. The eccentric loner, a grief-stricken widower, works as a gardener for the naturalist Charles Darwin. He shuns religion. But now Thomas needs answers. What should he believe in? And why should he continue to live?"

    If you listened to BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour this morning you may have heard Jenni Murray talking to Kate Manning about her novel My Notorious Life by Madame X which will be published on the 6th. of June. The book is set in 19th. century New York and is based on a true story as it follows the life of an Irish orphan, Axie Muldoon, from child beggar to the most succesful and controversial midwife of her time. "From the gutter to the glitter of 5th. Avenue", Axie's is a story of "freedom, family and the many faces of love, and above all, of one indomitable woman making her way in a difficult world." Another book I'm greatly looking forward to reading.

Bespoke books

    A question for you:

    if you could have a book written to order, in the same way that you might bespeak an item of clothing, commission a painting, or have an architect design a house to your specifications, what might it - the book - contain?

    This is all a fantasy of course, but if you could do so, is there a particular author you would choose to write a novel for you, and writer apart, what elements would you want incorporated in your ideal book? I'm talking about genre, style, setting, themes, mood, subject matter and so on, any characteristic or detail that would match your interests and your reading tastes. Another way to look at it is to consider what you would put into a novel if you were writing one yourself - the book you'd like to read.

    I do hope a good few people will respond to this because I shall be very interested to see what, if anything, crops up repeatedly, and then compare that in a very broad sense to what is typically being published currently.

On the shelf

    Remember these piles of books? Mr. C. has kindly given up a large part of his bank holiday weekend to put up new shelves for me so that a lot of what was on the floor now has a proper home.



    That empty space at the top is only temporary - there's plenty with which to fill it tomorrow when I sort the books properly, and I wish I could say that there were no piles left unshelved, but that's not so by a long way. However, the study does still have a bit more 'bare' wall that we could use, so maybe .... but for the moment, thank you again, Mr. C!

    (If you haven't already seen them and you'd like a peep at the shelves in the rest of the house, click here and follow the link).

Cornflower Book Group - The Razor's Edge

    To begin, an excerpt from my introductory post on W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge:

    "It is said to be one of his finest books, and "one of the most interesting". Selina Hastings in her biography The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham goes on, "In it he engages with the three topics which always most fascinated him, sexual passion, the mores of society and the nature of goodness, in this case as illustrated by the division between the material and spiritual worlds .... From publication the book made an enormous impact. There were many adulatory reviews - 'sheer delight' said Cyril Connolly, 'Mr. Maugham's best novel since Cakes and Ale' - and sales were immense."

    I can see why it got that adulation! I found this book so interesting - elegant, intelligent, what might be seen as a 'difficult' subject handled with respect and balance, and Maugham's own part in the narrative as observer, recorder, confidant, occasionally guide and mentor, was a masterly stroke.

    The story travels from America to France, from just after the First World War to many years later, and it concerns a young man, Larry Darrell and his spiritual quest. His wartime experiences have led him to abandon the conventional career path and marriage which were laid before him and which he was expected to take, to seek instead "a philosophy, or maybe a religion, and a rule of life that'll satisfy both his head and his heart." Larry is self-possessed, cordial, charming and serene, and in a journey across continents which takes him from manual labour to mysticism, meditation and contemplation, from study to selfless acts, we follow his progress with interest, and this reader for one cared about the outcome.

    As Larry's counterpart in the world of material things we have Elliott Templeton with his outrageous snobbishness and his "absurd affectations", his Charvet underpants monogrammed and coronetted, his 'collected personages' to rival those claimed as intimates by Lady Montdore in Love in a Cold Climate, his great wealth and essentially empty and trivial life. And Maugham weaves in and out between the two men, bumping into them in Paris or the south of France, getting news of them from friends and relatives, charting the undulations of their lives until the end when he deems it "a success story" in that everyone involved got what they wanted.

   There were some sharp and lovely lines ("American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers", and a passage on Elliott's vision of heaven), and I thought the book's easy, relaxed pace and composed, urbane style carried the story beautifully.

    How did you find it? What did you think?

Past, present, future

   

    My goodness, three days without a post, and still no joy with updating sidebars, but the reading goes on apace. I've just finished Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed (the chap can fairly tell a story!) and am about to begin The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker before going on to Iain Banks's Stonemouth, my first of his books.

    But while I go off now and write a bit about The Razor's Edge for tomorrow, I'd love to know what everyone else has been reading or what you have in prospect for the weekend.

Books and gardens - a meme

   

    This time last year we had fun with a books and gardens meme for Chelsea week, so let's do it again.

    Using the titles of books you've read recently (I've stuck to my 2013 list), fill in the 'blanks' in the sentences below, by all means altering them a bit to fit. Post your version on your own blog if you have one but leave a link for us in the comments here, or if you'd prefer, put the whole thing in a comment on this post. I know it's daft, but do have a go!

 

    Early this morning, at The Still Point of the Turning World, I stepped out of Thornyhold into the garden and began my Nature Cure.

    As dawn broke I noticed The Night Rainbow was fading as Gardening Women stood on the Sanctuary Line, The Uninvited Guests were handing out Instructions for a Heatwave, and under The Fever Tree, The Taste of Apple Seeds was strong.

    Later, while The Last Runaway went Astray looking for An Instance of the Fingerpost, Sidney Chambers and The Perils of the Night passed by, Red Joan looked in and with a glance at the temperature gauge on the greenhouse said She Rises, and I cut some asparagus with The Razor's Edge.

    Carefully raking a seed bed in preparation for sowing, I saw that Every Contact Leaves A Trace, and remembered The Promise made in The Lost Gardens of Heligan - When Nights were Cold - that there would be an Enchanted April.

    As I admired the fragrant flowers and luxuriant planting I saw that the garden was indeed Motherland, full of Life after Life.

This week's books, part 2

         Following on from yesterday's post, here is the balance of this week's arrivals:

    A Commonplace Killing is the last novel by Siân Busby who sadly died in September. The book has an introduction by the BBC's Robert Peston, Siân's husband, who transcribed the final part of the handwritten manuscript in the days after her death, and you can read it here. The novel itself will be broadcast on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime in June, and is about the discovery of a body, that of Lillian Frobisher, on a bomb site in north London in 1946. How did she come to be on the site? Whay was her husband unaware that she hadn't come home that night? "In this gripping murder story, Siân Busby gradually peels away the veneer of stoicism and respectability to reveal the dark truths at the heart of postwar austerity Britain."

    Next, "a Victorian gothic thriller by a master of the genre," The Asylum by John Harwood. "A young woman wakes in a strange bed... a sickly light filters through a metal grille. Dr. Maynard Straker steps into the room, and speaks. 'Have no fear, Miss Ashton. I am entirely at your service.' But that is not her name and she should not be here - in the Asylum. She is Miss Georgina Ferrars, of Gresham's Yard, London. And she can prove it. But when Dr. Straker sends a telegram to her uncle, the reply is swift: 'Georgina Ferrars here. Your patient must be an imposter.'"

    A Girl Like You by Maureen Lindley begins in 1939 in rural California. Thirteen-year-old "Satomi Baker is used to being different, being half American, half Japanese. When war is declared, Satomi's father Aaron is one of the first to sign up and is sent to the base at Pearl Harbor. He never returns. The community which has tolerated its foreign residents for decades suddenly turns on them, and along with thousands of other Japanese-American citizens, Satomi and her mother are sent to a brutal labour camp in the wilderness ... At Manzanar, Satomi learns what it takes to survive, and what it means to be American. But it will be years before she will discover who she really is under the surface of her skin."

    Winner of the Athens Prize for Literature in 2008, What Lot's Wife Saw by Ioanna Bourazopoulou, translated by Yiannis Panas, is a story of betrayal, sacrifice and unconditional love in a post-apocalyptic world. "It's been twenty-five years since the Overflow flooded Southern Europe, drowning Rome, Vienna and Istanbul, and turning Paris into a major port. At the Dead Sea, the earth has opened up to reveal a strange violet salt to the which the world has become addicted, and a colony has been established by the mysterious Consortium of Seventy-Five to control the supply. Run by murderers, fugitives and liars, the Colony is a haven to those fleeing Europe, but when its governor dies suddenly and mysteriously, the six officials turn on each other, sparking a terrifying chain of events which threatens its very existence. In Paris, Phileas Book, the greatest crossword compiler of his age and creator of the Epistleword, is recruited by the sinister Consortium. Presented with the epistolary confessions of the six, he is ordered to sift truth from lies to find out who killed the governor. But as Phileas starts to unravel the mystery, he begins to realise that these are no ordinary letters and that nothing less than the course of human history is at stake."

This week's books, part 1

    There is a gremlin making mischief in Typepad at the moment which means that I can't add any books to the sidebar lists, so here, 'manually', are some of the latest arrivals.

    Six books by Diana Souhami are at the top of the pile, and of them it's Gluck: Her Biography, on the artist Hannah Gluckstein, which I shall probably pick up first.

    The Uninvited by Liz Jensen comes next: "part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare", this book "engages deep emotions to spine-chilling (and suspenseful effect", says Lawrence Norfolk.

    Manu Joseph's The Illicit Happiness of Other People is a darkly comic story set in Madras in the 1990s involving "an adolescent cartoonist's dangerous interpretation of absolute truth, an inner circle of talented schizophrenics and the pure love of a twelve-year-old boy for a beautiful girl."

    Winner of The Terry Pratchett Prize, David Logan's Half-Sick Of Shadows is "a comical tragedy, a tale of childhood wonder (and despair), of familial dysfunction, of poetry, of the imagination and theoretical physics ... and more besides."

    Then comes Every Promise by Andrea Bajani, translated from the Italian by Alistair McEwen, "a brave and honest novel about what it means to be a man in the modern world; [the author's] imagery is wonderfully, uniquely imaginative, and his open approach to male vulnerability both moving and refreshing."

    More in part 2.

There's a word for it, apparently

   

 

    ... tsundoku.

 

 

Bringing books to the fore - Fiction Uncovered

   

    Posters from The Scottish Poetry Library quoting Julia Donaldon, C.S. Lewis and Andrew Lang on the joy of books and reading; (the middle one reminds me that Lewis aficionados may be interested to know that there is to be a Lewis Festival in Oxford in September - full details here).

    Celebrating books and bringing to the fore some you may not have come across is Fiction Uncovered, an initiative which I've written about before (in 2011 and 2012). This year's list includes Nell Leyshon's The Colour of Milk which was one of my 'books of the year' last year - there's a short post on it here - and so I'm delighted to see it get the recognition it deserves. Well done to Dovegreyreader and her fellow panellists, and equally well done to whoever was enlightened enough to ask a respected book blogger to take part - it's a great mark of recognition for Lynne herself and for the work the blogging community does in promoting books and helping them reach their readership.

The Still Point of the Turning World

 

    Time; a whole life ahead; expectations; milestones and achievements; a future. Those are some of the things we anticipate when we become parents - we look forward to seeing our child grow and develop, gain independence, follow their unique path. For Emily Rapp and her husband, time stopped when, at nine months old, their son Ronan was diagnosed with the rare and always fatal degenerative disorder Tay-Sachs disease. In her memoir The Still Point of the Turning World: A Mother's Story Emily recounts her response to the quirk of fate which robbed her of time and of a future with her son.

    As you would expect, this is a highly individual and introspective book, and written as it is by someone with a background in theology, it looks at grief and loss from a philosophical perspective as Emily tries to make sense of her changed reality through examining belief systems and reading the work of writers such as C.S. Lewis and Thomas Mann, Hegel and Mary Shelley. But of course, she cannot ever make 'sense' of a situation which would see her child regress instead of progress as normal development stalls and decline begins, one which would mean that he was living increasingly in a closed inner world, and which would see him die before his third birthday.

    "It is a unique and terrible privilege to witness the entire arc of a life, to see it through from inception to its end. But it is also an opportunity to love without a net, without the future, without the past, but right now."

    Emily's book ends before Ronan's passing. Its focus is not just on learning how to live with death but also on learning how to live, how to be  - in Eliot's phrase - at the still point of the turning world. It looks at healing and considers what it means to be 'healthy', to be 'well' (Emily herself was born with a congenital defect which resulted in the amputation of her leg when she was four); it examines grief, and here she looks to Lewis and his robust response to his own grief at the loss of his wife, one of faith and intelligence  - "a pairing that feels wholly unexpected, a colourful weasel popping out of an ordinary cardboard box" - and which among other things maps the limits of empathy.

    The writing here is raw and painful as also considered and reflective. Emily is fierce and brave, beaten and drained, indomitable and raging, accepting and unflinching. It is not a conventional picture of a response to illness and premature death, but one which looks beyond the personal to whatever bigger picture might provide an answer of sorts, a means of understanding the torment inherent in the questions 'why?' and 'how?' and 'what now?'.

Wayfarer wanted

    Here's a marvellous competition from Penguin Books, following in the virtual footsteps of Robert Macfarlane whose The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot will be out in paperback later this month:

     Penguin are looking for a Wayfarer, a person who will travel around the UK in July and August, visiting some of the Old Ways paths but also following some of their own, travelling into landscapes by discovering their stories, and reporting on their travels by way of blog posts, videos, social media and so on. The position is a paid one, and sounds like a marvellous opportunity for anyone with free time over the summer and, crucially, the wandering gene!

    You'll find all the details including how to enter at A Journey on Foot (and there are posts on The Old Ways here, here and here).

As yet unread books

   

     " 'Hello!' I said. 'Here's Larry's book.'

    'Yes, it came this morning, but I've been so busy, I had a thousand things to do before lunch and I was lunching out and I was at Molyneux's this afternoon. I don't know when I shall have a moment to get down to it.'

    I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and may be puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread til the reader has nothing else in the world to do."

    That's W. Somerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge speaking as himself, and ruefully of course, for how else would an author feel when that which represents years of time, effort and expertise goes unremarked and unregarded?

 

    As I'm here to spread the word so that the books I read or receive will in turn find their wider readership with a little help from these pages among others, I must press on with posting the recent arrivals, and today's book sounds as though it's one to look out for.

    Appetite by Philip Kazan is set in Italy in 1466:

    "In Florence, everyone has a passion. With sixty thousand souls crammed into a cobweb of clattering streets, countless alleys, cloisters and churches, they live their lives in the narrow world between walls. Nino Latini knows that if you want to survive without losing yourself completely, you've got to have a passion.

    But Nino's greatest gift will be his greatest curse. Son of a butcher and nephew of great painter Fra Filippo Lippi, Nino can taste things that other people cannot. Every flavour, every ingredient comes alive for him as vividly as a painting and he puts his artistry to increasingly extravagant use.

    In an age of gluttony and conspicuous consumption, his unique talent leads him into danger. His desire for the beautiful Tessina Delmazza and his longing to create the perfect feast could prove deadly. Nino must flee Florence to save his life and if he ever wants to see his beloved again, he must entrust himself to the tender mercies of fortune, and battle each of the deadly sins.

    Appetite is a story of lethal longing, the sensuous life of art and food against a backdrop of deadly power-plays and a city that won its place in history with equal measures of lust, genius and treachery."

    Nothing bland or inspid there, then!

Lost and found and gone astray

 

    This coming Wednesday, 15th. May, is European Literature Night and there are events taking place simultaneously in capital cities including one up here in Edinburgh and another at the British Library in London - click there for full details, and see also the panel discussion, Writing, Creativity and Translation, on the role of translation in European fiction.

    Among the writers giving readings and in conversation in London on Wednesday evening is the Catalan author Jordi Punti whose book Lost Luggage has been translated into 15 languages and won the Spanish National Critics' Prize in 2011. I have it on my TBR pile, and was drawn partly by the compliments it has received in reviews - "A conjuring trick. Incomparable literature", "an astonishing literary artefact. Marvellous...", and also by the blurb:

    "Christof, Christophe, Christopher and Cristòfol are four brothers - sons of the same father and four very different mothers, yet none of them knows of the others' existence. They live in Frankfurt, Paris, London and Barcelona and they unwittingly share the fact their father, a truck driver, abandoned them when they were little and they never heard from him again.

    Then one day, Cristòfol is contacted by the police: his father is officially a missing person. This fact leads him to discover that he has three half-brothers, and the four young men come together for the first time... Divided by geography yet united by blood, the "Cristobales' set out on a quest to find their father, one that is painful, hilarious and extraordinary. They discover a man who during thirty years of driving was able to escape the darkness of Franco's Spain and to explore a luminous Europe, a journey that, with the birth of his sons, both opened and broke his heart."

                                                           ~~~~~

 

    Now for some pure escapist reading. I picked up Mary Stewart's Thornyhold late last night and quickly became happily engrossed in it. Here's the gist:

    "To Gilly, Thornyhold is an enchanted cottage, a bequest from her cousin whose magical visits had brightened a lonely childhood. And it comes just in time to save Gilly from a bleak future after the death of her parents. Thornyhold has a resident black cat - and a reputation for magic; as she learns more about her cousin's herbalist skills, her abilities to foresee events and to heal, Gilly realises that she has inherited more than just the house itself ..."

    That suits my reading mood perfectly.

                                                           ~~~~~

 

    Thanks to everyone who entered the draw to win a copy of Emma Donoghue's Astray, and who named a favourite book about travelling or journeys in so doing. It is Nicky's name which has come out of the hat, so I'll get the book on its way very soon, and I hope we'll have another draw before long.

Reading to settle the soul

    "It’s the kind of book I always mean to read, and when I did I felt my soul settle down."

    That's Ann Patchett talking - here - about a collection of poetry, and I quote her because I love the way she has captured the experience of reading something which lets all the mental puzzle pieces fall into place, brings serenity, calms and centres.

    That line prompted me to ask for suggestions of reading to settle the soul, so if you can think of a book which does that, please do say. Meanwhile I'll nominate Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From The Sea which I wrote about some time ago.

(The picture is Bluebells in Delcombe Wood by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson, and it is used on the cover of Through the Woods by H.E. Bates, a book I haven't read but one which sounds as though it is soul-settling stuff.)

Books in brief

   

    A few words on some recent reads:

    Much has been written about Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, and I found this complex and highly original book - which takes a life through a range of permutations of fate - absolutely stunning. It's clever, it's meticulous, it has foxed and flummoxed some reviewers, but this one loved it.

    

    Elanor Dymott's Oxford crime novel Every Contact Leaves A Trace - which I spoke a bit about here - is ambitious and doesn't quite achieve what it sets out to do. I guessed the culprit correctly, but the case for why a murder was committed in the first place could have been better made, and certain characters and their actions were implausible. That said, I did find it thoroughly engrossing, but I think its reach exceeds its grasp, and a tighter edit would have served it better.

   

    Dancing to the Flute by Manisha Jolie Amin was the subject of a post the other day. This is a charming and uplifting novel about music, life and friendship - it's warm and touching, and was a very interesting and pleasurable read, the musical theme giving it an extra, fascinating cultural dimension.

Crime: the chemist and the Canon investigate

 

    If you're in the market for gritty, realistic crime novels then skip this post now. If, on the other hand, you relish unconventional sleuths, civilised, period settings, mysteries whose raison d'être is character rather than plot, then the books I'm talking about today should suit nicely.

    Speaking from Among the Bones is the fifth in Alan Bradley's very lively, highly original series set in an English village in the 1950s, centred around his eleven-year-old amateur chemist, expert in poisons and eagle-eyed investigator, Flavia de Luce. Living with her father and sisters in their crumbling ancestral home Buckshaw, the precocious Flavia - who has inherited her Great Uncle Tarquin's chemistry laboratory and has an extensive knowledge of most topics, whether scientific or otherwise - uses her powers of observation and ingenuity to get to the bottom of all sorts of goings-on in Bishop's Lacey. In this latest episode of her adventures, the church organist is found murdered at the same time as the tomb of St. Tancred is being excavated and the saint's remains exhumed, her family's financial worries deepen, and the drama of her home life continues to the very last page.

    James Runcie's 'detective' Sidney Chambers is a man of the cloth, of a type with Kenneth More* in Genevieve, and the owner of a black Labrador called Dickens (so who could resist?), and he's back in the second in a planned series of six books which will take him from the 1950s to 1981. On the subject of chronology for a moment, I love the novelist's ability to either stop time - Flavia has been eleven since the books began and she has packed a great deal into that 'year' - or alter its speed for their convenience, e.g. Sidney's daily existence (which often engages him with real events) unfolds at one speed, while other aspects of his life, most notably his romantic liaisons, are conveniently stalled or drawn out over implausibly long periods! But to get back to the book itself, Sidney Chambers and The Perils of the Night is a series of six interlocking stories in which Sidney, as vicar of Grantchester and fellow of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, helps his great friend Inspector Geordie Keating solve various crimes concerning his parishioners and college associates. As ever, Sidney's conscience guides him, but as he strives to "put his acquired identity, as a man of faith, above his own essential nature," he is faced with difficult decisions. It is these moral dilemmas, Sidney's wisdom and humanity, and his *"mixture of decency and optimism" which are so appealing, and which make these novels a great pleasure to read.

    Whether you are in the mood for a book with brio (Flavia) or something a little more reflective (Sidney), both series are charming and really rather fun.

Out in paperback - my novel of the year

   

    My 'novel of the year' last year was Lawrence Norfolk's John Saturnall's Feast, and as the paperback edition has just been published, I wanted to mention the book again today.

    If you haven't already heard of it you may like to see my post on it which explains why I thought it was so special.